Reply #30: Report details CIA role in overthrow of Iranian government in 1953 [View All]

[Octafish]

Here's history Corporate McPravda must've forgotten:

Report details CIA role in overthrow of Iranian government in 1953

By David Walsh
19 April 2000
WSWS.org

EXCERPT...

The role of the New York Times in the current sequence of events should simply be noted. The secret history of the coup was “provided to The Times by a former official who kept a copy,” Risen writes. In an accompanying article, he provides some details as to how the American press was manipulated by the intelligence agency at the time (details that contradict the article's headline, “C.I.A. Tried, With Little Success, to Use U.S. Press in Coup”). Risen recounts how CIA officials planted articles with the Associated Press and Newsweek and made use of a Times correspondent in advancing the shah's cause.

The secret history complains, however, that the spy agency “lacked contacts capable of placing material so that the American publisher was unwitting as to its source.” If anything has changed over the intervening decades it is that the relations between the US government, CIA and the press are far more intimate. In the recent conflict in Kosovo the news media, including quite centrally the New York Times, acted by and large as the unquestioning mouthpiece for the NATO high command and the US State Department. In publishing the history of the 1953 coup the Times' editorial staff means, one way or another, to serve American geopolitical aims, the accomplishment of which would only mean more suffering for the Iranian people.

Details of the coup

According to the secret history, written in March 1954 by Dr. Donald N. Wilber, one of the coup's planners, the credit for coming up with the idea of overthrowing Mossadegh must go to British intelligence, who proposed it to their US counterparts in late 1952. British interests had retained control of Iran's oil fields after World War II through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The decision by Iran's parliament to take over the oil industry, a struggle identified with Prime Minister Mossadegh, infuriated officials in London.

SNIP...

Apparently plans for a coup got a boost in March 1953 when an Iranian general approached the US embassy about support for an army-engineered coup. In April CIA chief Allen W. Dulles authorized $1 million to be spent “in any way that would bring about the fall of Mossadegh.” An initial coup plan was drawn up at a gathering of US and British intelligence officials in Cyprus in May 1953. The CIA began distributing “gray propaganda” in the streets of Tehran, including anti-government cartoons, and “planting unflattering articles in the local press.”

In June 1953 British and American officials finalized their conspiracy plan at a meeting in Beirut. Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, soon arrived in Iran to oversee its implementation. On July 11, President Dwight Eisenhower signed off on the plan.

The primary difficulty for the CIA at the time was convincing the shah to take part in the plot. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, father of the Persian Gulf commander, was enlisted to help gain the shah's cooperation. The British also attempted to sway Pahlavi.

Meanwhile the operation went ahead. One of the dirty tricks employed by the CIA was to have agents pretend to be Iranian Communists and threaten Moslem leaders with “savage punishment if they opposed Mossadegh.” In another incident the house of at least one prominent religious leader was bombed by CIA agents posing as Communists.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/iran-a19.shtml

Must be irony how all those familiar names get left out of all the wars and so forth since.

PS: Thank you, Catherina. I very much appreciate your kindness.